Newspaper headlines recently announced a report, from The Center for Public Integrity, of 935 false statements made by President Bush and top Administration officials as “part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.” Those of us who smoked the deception early in the game profess outrage, but not surprise. How could anyone have been hoodwinked by Secretary Rice's warning that the next smoking gun could be a mushroom cloud? Of course it could – and still may be – but not from Iraq; and they knew it. Weren't we saddened at the sight of that loyal old soldier, Colin Powell, waving an empty pill bottle and calling it the sinister face of a deadly threat?

Well, actually, most of the American public weren't outraged or saddened. And even after years of revelations of exaggerations, falsehoods, and profiteering, a tremendous number of us still “support our troops” – code words for staying a destructive course in spite of billions of dollars down the drain, dozens of thousands of lives lost, disgust increasing everywhere for United States foreign policy, and, where it matters most, hatred of our nation fanned to white heat.

It's difficult for us on one side of these issues to understand the feelings and rationale of those on the other. Up here in the land of town meeting, where we all pretty much know the views of our neighbors – whether we agree with them or not – and where our sense of irony has been sharpened by centuries of fickle weather, black flies, and rocks in the garden, we're pretty much insulated from the heartland media that feed the fires of conservative partisanship – what one friend of mine calls “hurling red meat to the unwashed.” So it comes as a bit of a surprise when, after the Brattleboro town warrant called for debate and action on a resolution charging President Bush and Vice-President Cheney with war crimes, angry patriots from all over the country weighed in by telephone and e-mail, calling in return for the execution of the selectboard members for treason, should they pass the measure. Has no other region of the country any appreciation of irony?

Besides which, we've been here a hundred times before this, and we'll be here a hundred times more. We've been lied to in our own lifetimes by – among thousands of others – Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. Yet each time we profess ourselves to be shocked. We forget that being in politics is a lot like having stern, demanding parents: It often feels too expensive to admit the truth. And we're amazingly inconsistent. We spent $40 million investigating an attempted coverup of an act of fellatio, and now decline to proceed with an impeachment charging high crimes and misdemeanors that, provable or not, have resulted in so many thousands of deaths and, before the scenario is played out, may have irretrievably crippled our nation's financial condition.

The British have always had a most refreshing attitude toward the buncombe that the government generates over matters of deep moment. The superb and now-defunct British comedy team Beyond the Fringe expressed it beautifully. In one sketch, they described the result of a poll of British citizens conducted by an anti-nuclear-weapons group. The British public, they announced, was overwhelmingly in favor of nuclear disarmament. The pollsters had asked the question, "Would you like to see your wives and kids go up in a puff of smoke?" and claimed that 94% of those polled had responded negatively, a ringing endorsement for banning the bomb.

What I'm suggesting is that we get over the heavy-breathing vituperation and Internet death threats. Except for the gross immorality of our attack on Iraq under false pretenses, and our flirtation with financial disablement, it wouldn't hurt us to lighten up on the righteousness, which often as not masks personal agendas.

Mother and I have recently been watching a series of Canadian history videos, and I must say it's refreshing to see American history (Canadians are Americans, too, you know) from someone else's point of view. Particularly interesting to Canadians was the American Revolution, when thousands of colonials who favored continued union with the British Crown were labeled Loyalists and declared outlaws. Opportunistic patriots exploited the situation to murder or exile them – most went to Canada – and seize their property. It's hard to believe all of that was pure patriotism instead of raw cupidity. In the same way, it's hard to see the venom coming over the Internet today as anything but the offspring of some fear otherwise inexpressible.

The 935 Lies, for example. If verifiable, they simply demonstrate a possibly record-setting capacity for administration untruth and a fascinating contempt for the intelligence of the American people. We ought to get off the backs of Congress for failing to bring impeachment charges; we'd be running in mud for the rest of the year instead of getting far more important things done. The President says he looks forward to the judgment of history on his administration. A great idea; I'm kind of looking forward to that, too, in the decade or so I've got left. Meanwhile, I can't help but think of the 935 Lies as quite similar to the phenomenon in the first book I can recall reading, The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins. That's got some pretty catchy possibilities.